The Pink and the Grey by Anthony Camber Page A

read. A laminated set of instructions on how to give CPR to an ethnically diverse set of fatties, all of whom had mysteriously grown felt-tip moustaches. Windows that defied all attempts to let in air in summer or to retain heat in winter.
    If you wanted an atmosphere you opened the drawer with the whiteboard markers and huffed till your eyes spun.
    Geoff’s desk watched over the room. To his right, Simon’s domain: haphazard, disorganised unless you were Simon. To Geoff’s left, mine and Manish’s area. Kiddy corner, they sometimes called it. We were obliged to keep ourselves nice and tidy, or else. It was part of our “apprenticeship” apparently, along with the crappy wages and the bullying. I think we were allowed one piece of unfiled paper per year of service, which was fine, since paper was for old people.
    The editor’s desk lay silent and brooding, and locked down tight. I didn’t go near it: I was hardly going to tip it upside-down in any case. There wasn’t going to be a padlocked box inside a combination safe inside an unlabelled file drawer, marked TOP SECRET: PEARLY TWAT’S EYES ONLY. He’d keep all the dirt on his computer in a folder marked stuff with all the porn, like everyone does.
    I wasn’t here for that anyway. I was here to investigate the hell out of Seb’s story. I wanted to pull at the threads, to see if there was information Seb wasn’t telling me. Did his father really leave to set up another business? Was it legit? Where was his mother? What about his sister? What does Seb do for a living now? Were there any baby photos I could embarrass him with?
    I knew in my gut it would all check out — he was a clever man and I wasn’t exactly daft myself, and he knew I wouldn’t blindly take his word for it. This wasn’t a trust exercise. I was potentially putting my meagre pittance of a salary on a gossamer line. Geoff would fire my arse soon as look at me. There were plenty of more compliant Geoff juniors out there gagging for the gig if I accidentally fell out of the window that didn’t open.
    Armed with Seb’s unusual surname and my infinite Google-fu, plus a quick dance through some news agency archives we must have subscribed to when Geoff was half-cut and more compliant, the information trickled through nicely. It wasn’t clear what Daddy Greatsholme was doing now other than sitting on piles of cash: he’d been spending most of his time running and funding impressively lucrative hedges and other shrubbery. There was less on the family side and virtually nothing about Seb specifically, but the internet confirmed that he did, in fact, exist, and he was the guy I was speaking to — and it wasn’t those parts of the internet that make themselves up, either. A quick phone call to a college friend, with access to the archives Geoff was too skinflint to cough up for, second-sourced a lot of it.
    The big fat cockney bastard unknown in all this was Geoff. He was a git to be sure. That’s partly the job of an editor: spike that story, sub out that gossip, drag you away from that tea to fill that gaping space with yet another story about those dreary punt wars. It didn’t make him evil, or vindictive, although he was.
    I despised the man. But was it right to pursue him for a dodgy story two decades old?
    Was it wrong not to?
    I stayed in on Saturday night, which triggered three texts from people asking if I was ill or off the market, and I spent Sunday hibernating and drinking pints of strong, sugary tea. I needed some kind of plan for Monday.

    The traditional Bugle extended Monday pub lunch was an opportunity to chew over the gristle of the weekend and its dull football results and maybe pitch a story or two for this week’s edition. Geoff would always sit at one end of the table with his enormous team, all three of us, along the sides: it was an editorial meeting with beer and Thai food.
    Geoff had a face etched on leather by an unhappy child: circular, with round eyes, round nose,